The Checkup Archive: Vaccines

Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who made now widely discredited claims about a link between autism and childhood vaccines, explored business arrangements to capitalize on the supposed association, according to a new report. In a follow-up to another report published last week in the British medical journal BMJ, investigative reporter...

A paper in the new issue of Pediatrics finds that when siblings are born 12 or fewer months apart, the second child's risk of autism is tripled compared to that of children born a year or more after their older sibling.

Something seems to have shifted in the world of autism. There was a time when a study finding no link between the mercury-based preservative thimerosal (used in the MMR, or measles/mumps/rubella, vaccine) and autism would have raised an uproar from activists who insist such a link exists.
But when the journal Pediatrics published on Monday a study that found no increased risk of autism among babies who'd been exposed prenatally or in the first 20 months of life to ethylmercury from vaccines, it was met with a general shrug.